Notwithstanding all this, it was not I, not I, but she who had changed. That little maiden who six months before knew nothing of God's world, to whose mind it had never occurred to mention feelings, and for whom such a conversation would have been as Chinese, carried it on to-day as freely and accurately as if she had been reciting a lesson. How had that child mind developed and become so flexible? But wonderful things take place in girls. More than one falls asleep in the evening a child and wakes up in the morning a woman, with another world of feelings and thoughts. For Hania, with a nature quick, capable, sensitive, the passage of her sixteenth year, another sphere of society, learning, books, read, perhaps, in secret,—all this was more than sufficient.
Meanwhile we walked on side by side in silence which Hania was the first to break.
"Then you are in love, Pan Henryk?"
"Perhaps," answered I, with a smile.
"Then you will be sighing for Warsaw?"
"No, Hania; I should be glad were I never to leave here."
Hania glanced at me quickly. Evidently she wished to say something, but was silent. After a while, however, she struck her skirts lightly with the parasol, and said, as if answering her own thoughts,—
"Ah, what a child I am!"
"Why dost thou say that, Hania?"
"Oh, so— Let us sit on this bench and talk of something else. Is not the view from here beautiful?" asked she, with that well-known smile on her lips.